The most important thing about SEO is that an ‘out-of-the-box’ formula for achieving top rankings will not work as well as a customized, one-on-one strategy for each project.

Yes, a cookie-cutter approach will work – but it won’t be as effective as a custom-made battle plan for your website. The general principles will always apply to your website, but there’s a significant component of analysis, drawing conclusions and then determining what to do in light of those conclusions.

At the end of the day, it is YOUR SEO plan. You will decide what to focus on, you will be the one doing

competitive analysis and evaluating how difficult or easy it will be for your website to rank for particular

keywords.

Every website has different goals – these goals will in turn determine what type of keywords you will be

targeting, what the composition of your audience will be, the competitiveness of your target market and your willingness to spend money / put in the time and effort.

Here’s an example of how you would customize the SEO process based on your project:

Site A is focused on a very niche topic and is an informational site (as opposed to a product-oriented site).

This has an influence on the keywords targeted for the site. Those keywords (as well as the target niche itself) have weak competition, so it will take less effort and time (and money) to get Site A to rank #1 for its target terms.

Also, Site A will depend exclusively on search engines for traffic.

Based on this information, you would have two choices – you can save money by doing ‘free’ SEO and not

paying for directory submissions and links. Or, you could save time and pay for inclusion in highly trusted directories to give your website’s rankings a kick up the search engine results.

Here’s another example:

Site B is a corporate website of a rapidly-growing company in a fairly competitive industry. This sector is not as competitive online, however – some terms have little competition while others have moderate competition (later on we’ll also define what ‘competition’ really is and how you can determine your top competing websites).

Search engines will only be one aspect of their online marketing strategy. Primarily this site is being set up to highlight their services, which means targeting some top level keywords (which have plenty of competition).

Based on this information, you know that to be #1, you will need to invest both time and money in the project.

Paying for directory submissions is a must and so is spending money on purchasing links. Some of these

keywords will also take a long and concerted spell of link building to allow for page 1 rankings.

In this case, your SEO strategy will also depend on how much freedom you have to spend money and make changes to the website – you may be asked to show results before paying for links (although in my experience paying for directory submissions is usually accepted without hesitation) and making changes to a corporate website is usually a painful experience in dealing with red tape and people afraid of change.

All in all, you’ll have to think for yourself here – I can give you the tools and show you how to do each task, but I cannot be there with you at every step of the way or make decisions for you.

The good thing is – if you stick to the guidelines mentioned in this blog, you will do just fine ;-)